Not being the main or maybe even the intended target, I nevertheless use and enjoy the service they offer.
A screen grab from the text-only section of the CNN website displays a simple but functional low-bandwidth look.
Quick-to-load or low-bandwidth sites are gaining in popularity as alternatives to multi-featured, interactive websites. Particularly for news, information and current events, low bandwidth websites provide content for people who cannot (or choose not to) access high-speed Internet services for different reasons.
They could be economic, geographic, technical or cultural reasons – or just plain personal preference.
Some folks just don’t like the clutter of fully-featured websites intended for broadband-based consumption: all those pop-up ads, autoplay videos, annoying PiP (picture-in-picture) screens that follow you everywhere. When current and relevant information is all you seek, much of what those fully featured websites serve up is digitally-delivered distraction.
Worse still, it’s often a costly and potentially dangerous distraction. Big, bloated websites can consume more data and at a faster rate than simple display of text. They can trigger more electricity consumption, both at the ISP/server side and the user end, because of higher CPU usage and greater bandwidth requirements for cell phone transmission and mobile data connectivity.
Big sites also use a range of tracking and development metrics that are not all that efficient in terms of bandwidth consumption, and not all that safe in terms of privacy. All the overhead associated with monitored interactive content delivery increases the risk that malicious code can be injected and concealed in the broadband data stream.
Of course, even when it’s wanted, some folks can’t get broadband because it’s just not offered in all regions or locales. While the digital divide in Canada is often seen as strictly a rural-urban gap, researchers have said that even in our largest cities, other factors are at play: income, age, race, and ability also affect access to digital services, devices and sufficient speed.
But in the worse case scenarios, now more common than ever it seems, some folks can’t get high-speed Internet access because they’re battling a natural disaster or extreme weather situation: they need important news, weather, and local updates despite intermittent reception or reduced connectivity.
Low-bandwidth sites have proven to be a valuable response in such precarious scenarios.
When the second most powerful Atlantic storm ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico bore down on the Florida coast recently, the websites associated with National Public Radio went low-bandwidth for the duration, serving up simple, text-only news content, including hurricane tracking information.
Analysis showed that a low-bandwidth page consumed some 400 times less bandwidth than normally designed pages; the size of an NPR station’s main page was down to 21.5 kilobytes; over eight megabytes was the norm!
Reducing a webpage load time from possibly minutes on slower connections to mere seconds is one of the benefits realized at CBC as well, with the introduction and enhancement of its low-bandwidth, text-based news service, CBC Lite.
First pitched internally some five years ago, it was introduced in 2021 and it has undergone continual updates, patches and enhancements since, adding front-end features and new sections, while upgrading the back-end functionality.
First pitched internally some five years ago, CBC Lite was introduced in 2021 and it has undergone continual updates, patches and enhancements since.
CBC Lite makes use of a technical process called server-side rendering, a process used since the mid ‘90s and the early days of the Web. Server-side rendering means that large capable machines do the heavy lifting on the server side when it comes to rendering a webpage and all its components, not the user’s computer.
It’s a way to reduce load times, speed up data transfer and improve performance issues over slower connections or on older devices. So, too, efficient caching strategies can reduce the need for redirects and added server requests, each of which requires data.
‘Minimization tools’ can also be used on low bandwidth sites to remove unnecessary data – characters – from HTML, CSS and JavaScript codes
CBC (and other such low bandwidth sites) serves only what is necessary to its audience, keeping the payloads as small as possible by stripping out unnecessary overhead and delivering only the few needed kilobytes of data, not unnecessary megabytes or more.
But low-bandwidth sites do not have to be text-only.
For its part, CBC has in recent updates added media and radio player capabilities, based on its own internally-developed content player. Audio streams are locked into low bitrate streams, saving users some data while maintaining a usable, listenable connection.
There is also access to enhanced bandwidth images on the Lite site, and a new method to load images when desired without using Java, an efficient yet data-using program language, is now available.
CBC says more than a million users across the country access CBC.ca on dial-up every month, and more than 10 million users visit every month using cellular data (with many not on unlimited data plans). While the overall percentage of people using dial-up is in the single digits, with some 350,000 to 450,000 people in North America using the slower service to get online, it is clear that online access is still a valuable service, and that clean uncluttered websites are still an enjoyable read.
It may be from necessity, it may be from preference, but low-bandwidth websites are a way to save costs, improve access, and enhance your focus on the content you want.
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Websites and their visitors exchange data in order to show web pages and related content. There’s a cost associated with moving that data, in time, money and needed resources. It’s a cost that low bandwidth website visitors want to reduce while still accessing needed content. Image courtesy: The Caribbean Network operators Group (CaribNOG)
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